Keep up to date with the latest news and information about UsingEnglish.com including new content, features and updates.

Over the last few months we have been working very hard behind the scenes to provide a major security upgrade to UsingEnglish.com.

Since UsingEnglish.com launched in February 2002 users have been accessing the site using something called the HTTP protocol. You will perhaps recognise this as the first part of many internet addresses, such as in http://www.usingenglish.com/. Without wanting to get too deep into what this is, suffice to say that the HTTP protocol is an old and fairly insecure technology. Many many sites are using this as a way for users to access them, but increasingly sites are converting to the safer HTTPS protocol.

On 14th August 2016 we successfully performed the switch to HTTPS and have been closely monitoring it every since.

In the past it was a requirement that you would have to register with the site before you could access any advanced level content in the teacher handout and online quiz sections, and some beginner and intermediate content in those areas was also reserved for members only.

We at UsingEnglish.com are very pleased to announce that, as of today, we have removed that requirement. All of our beginner, intermediate and advanced teacher handouts and online quizzes are now freely available to everyone without the need to register. This means that you now have access to an additional 225 free handouts and quizzes.

We think this is great news for everyone wanting to learn English, or for those who teach the language, so please help us spread the word by sharing this news with all of your friends and collegues.

You could also help us by sharing this post on your blog, your site or on your social media channels.

We have now made a selection of our English idioms available to download. We've recently published our British and American English idiom lists, and our list of animal idioms, in PDF format. These PDFs include lists of English idiom expressions and phrases with their meanings and definitions. We'll be adding to the available downloads over time so keep checking back to see what's new!

Now then, I have no idea who might be reading this note but I'm asking you to take a pause and please consider this... I'm donating my birthday to Cancer Research... in other words I'm fundraising to help save lives by discovering new ways to prevent, diagnose and treat cancer.

In order to comply with a new European law relating to the use of personal information, we have updated our privacy policy. This now includes a thorough analysis of our use of your personal information and our use of tracking technologies like cookies. Don't Panic! We don't do anything nasty with your information, and this new version of our policy should help you see that nothing bad is happening to your data when you use our site.

On Friday 1st July 2011 from 19:30 - 23:00 BST we will be performing some system maintenance and as a result we expect that there may be periods during which the site will be unavailable. We hope to have the maintenance completed quickly but if you find that the site is not responding, or is otherwise misbehaving, please try again outside of this time period. We will keep you posted if any of the details change, and you can get up-to-the-minute updates by following us on our Twitter feed here: http://twitter.com/UsingEnglish.

Whilst this blog has remained quite for long periods of time, it doesn't mean that work and new developments on the site have stopped. Far from it. The server and the site are continually monitored, optimised and improved. The main reason for the quietness is that, on the whole there's not a lot to show for this work on the site's interface.

Here's a case in point:

Last night at around 22:30 in the evening I implemented a little trick to help speed up access to the site. I configured the site to utilise caching in a more optimised and efficient way. It seems to have worked, for me at least.

The Site Diary has been quiet for some time now, but there has been a lot of work going on behind the scenes to improve UsingEnglish.com and to build a base for the future. Here I will attempt to catalogue the key developments that have been made to the site over the last few months, and explain what they may mean for the future.

UsingEnglish.com helps the fight against spam by using Captchas on many of the forms we have on-site. As of today, we've started used a superb new service that not only fights spam, but helps digitise old books at the same time.